this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] ziviz@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The short answer is Rust was built with safety in mind. The longer answer is C was built mostly to abstract from assembly without much thought to safety. In C, if you want to use an array, you must manually request a chunk of memory, check to make sure you are writing within the bounds of your array, and free up the memory used by your array when completely done using it. If you do not do those steps correctly, you could write to a null pointer, cause a buffer overflow error, a use-after-free error, or memory leak depending on what step was forgotten or done out of order. In Rust, the compiler keeps track of when variables are used through a borrowing system. With this borrowing system the Rust compiler requests and frees memory safely. It also checks array bounds at run-time without a programmer explicitly needing to code it in. Several high-level languages have alot of these safety features too. C# for example, can make sure objects are not freed until they fall out of scope, but it does this at run-time with a garbage collector where Rust borrower rules are done at compile-time.

[–] AffineConnection@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

C was built mostly to abstract from assembly

That’s actually not true; rather, many modern architectures are designed to allow languages like C to be compiled more easily. Old architectures don’t even have a built-in stack.